Samsung calls Magna Carta Holy Grail privacy concerns “baseless”

Samsung paired with up Jay-Z for the launch of his latest album. This partnership brought the release of the Magna Carta Holy Grail app that allowed one million people to grab the full album a few days before the public release. This was a fairly unique way to launch an album and not only assured one million people would have the album, but with what sounded good came some bad.

There were numerous complaints the day the album was made available. Most of the complaints dealt with users not actually being able to download the tracks. Those issues seem to have worked themselves out with some time (and patience on the part of the users). But when those dissolved a new series of complaints surfaced.

These others were dealing with the way the app required lots of social sharing in order to grab any extras. One example was with the lyrics. Basically, you were going to be sharing something on a social network if you wanted to grab the lyrics direct from the app. Taking this all a step further though, the Magna Carta Holy Grail app also received some attention from officials at the US civil liberties group the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (Epic).

In this case there were claims about the app being used to collect "massive amounts of personal information from users, including location data." And addressing the social sharing for extras came talk of "hidden spam techniques." Well, flash forward to the present day and it looks like Samsung has responded to those claims.

Samsung has addressed the issue of privacy, mentioning that it is a top priority for them. Furthermore, they called the complaints "baseless." The Samsung statement read as follows;

"Any information obtained through the application download process was purely for customer verification purposes, app functionality purposes and for marketing communications, but only if the customer requests to receive those marketing communications... Samsung is in no way inappropriately using or selling any information obtained from users through the download process."